ATDTDA (5.4) - Bad Ice After Midnight

[Monte Davis]

Carvill John wrote:

>   There's a lot of talk about space, time, dimensions, etc. I wish I 
> understood more of it. I wish some scientifically minded p-lister 
> would contribute some kind of ATD Math Overview. Monte?

Nowhere near enough time or focus for an overview, but a few notes 
specifically on the Transnoctial  Discussion Group:

"with oceangoing ships we left flat surfaces and went into Riemann space..."

Pure flimflam. We associate the longitude problem,  great-circle routes, 
etc. with oceangoing ships because of contingencies of the history of 
European exploration, but that's all perfectly manageable with good old 
geometry and trigonometry in good old Euclidean/Cartesian 3-space. 
There's nothing inherently more "Riemannian" about sailing from Ostend 
to Singapore than about walking.

"...Planet Earth."
"Which not so long ago was believed to be a plane surface."

Historical mythology, of course. Wikipedia notwithstanding, Washinton 
Irving didn't invent the meme that Columbus had proved the world round, 
but his 1828 biography did cement it in Anglophone pop culture-- and 
provides a superb example of "how good it feels to condescend to our 
benighted ancestors, even if we have to misrepresent them to do so."  It 
shouldn't need to be said, but  the sphericity of the earth  had been 
conventional wisdom (among the small educated fraction who thought about 
such things at all) at least since Hellenistic times. Columbus' 
challenge to late-15th-century conventional wisdom was to argue that the 
earth was ~15,000 miles in circumference rather than (as most 
authorities correctly believed) ~25,000 miles, so that a then-feasible 
westward voyage from the Azores could reach China.

P knows all this, of course, and I have to think this is a blatant flag 
that we're in Weird Science territory.

"Time moves on but one axis," advised Dr. Blope, "past to future..."
[Dr. Rao] "... the possibility of linear time becoming circular, and so 
achieving eternal return as simply, or should I say complexly, as that."

There are libraries' worth of reflections on linear and cyclical time, 
but what strikes me here is the smooth, almost automatic assimilation of 
"time as a dimension"  to the *spatial* sense of "dimension" as 
"something you can, in principle, move freely in." All I'm gonna say for 
now is that *nothing in the science or mathematics of the AtD years 
supports that in any way* -- to the contrary, in fact. The reasoning 
from Maxwell through Einstein that showed an unsuspected relationship 
between space and time also *constrained* that relationship in very 
specific ways. To put it bluntly, after Einstein time was even *less* 
"just another" dimension like the conventional three than it had been 
before, and backwards "travel in time" made even less sense than it had 
before. The games P plays with that in AtD are addressed to the human 
yearning to turn back the clock, and/or to have our cake in one 
chronology nd eat it in another -- and *not* citations of any putative 
scientific authority for doing so.

With all due respect to the timeless wisdom of the East, I don't think 
it's accidental that Dr. Rao is a compatriot of the Dr. Chandrasekhar 
who assured the Cleveland Aetherists on p. 63 that the negative result 
of the Michelson-Morley experiment proved the same thing that a positive 
result would have proved.



 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070327/21762060/attachment.html>